Month: August 2019

Young people don’t get married. Young people are covered in tattoos. Now that I’m middle-aged, this is the kind of thing it would be tempting to see as evidence that the world is going to the dogs, that we’re facing some sort of terrible moral decline and that the solution is for everyone to buck up and improve their attitude.

I think we are indeed facing a growing cultural crisis, but I’m increasingly of the view that telling young people to buck up wholly misses the point, and that what we are seeing isn’t a deterioration of attitude but an emanation of something more like despair. Two things I’ve read recently prompted this line of thought.

This rather wonderful article from the Institute for Family Studies is worth a read in its own right for a wealth of beautifully phrased observations on marriage. But one paragraph, on the decline of marriage among the young and/or less wealthy, pulled me right up short:

I think the problem that the less wealthy are having [in regards to marriage] is this kind of achievement attitude that we have about marriage—that I can’t get married because I don’t have a stable job; I can’t get married because one of the partners is not employed, and I don’t want to be on the hook for them or a drag on them. I think that the American government, for all that it loves marriage, does not support families very well. The minimum wage here is a joke; people would have to work 25/8 on that to support a family. There’s so little family leave. It’s brutal, especially at the lower end of the wage spectrum. If you don’t work in a knowledge industry, if you’re sort of an hourly employee, it’s incredibly hard to have a family and have children. Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin writes a lot about how the working classes have abandoned marriage partly because it’s an achievement and partly because getting married suggests a plan for the future; it’s an optimistic thing to do. And I think that often people find that they just don’t have enough hope in the future to be able to make that statement…

That is to say, maybe it is not the deliquescing effect of corrupting liberal values that are causing this breakdown in willingness to commit long-term among the young and/or poor. Maybe these demographics are not getting married because they don’t have enough hope for the future to make long-term decisions seem like a good use of energy and resources. Let that sink in. How utterly screwed are we as a society if we’re so inapable of solidarity across generations that anyone young, or less wealthy is sinking into a kind of future-free despair?

according to numerous measures, those with tattoos, especially visible ones, are more short-sighted and impulsive than the non-tattooed. Almost nothing mitigates these results, neither the motive for the tattoo, the time contemplated before getting tattooed nor the time elapsed since the last tattoo. Even the expressed intention to get a(nother) tattoo predicts increased short-sightedness and helps establish the direction of causality between tattoos and short-sightedness.

Conservatives such as Dalrymple write about tattoos as cultural degradation, with the clear inference that what it evidences is a collective moral decline. But if this study is correct, that is only half right: rather, it points to a rise in short-termism. That could be read as moral decline of a sort. After all, an inability to plan for the future is a serious inhibitor if anyone’s ability to think and act socially, or with any of the ability to defer gratification we associate with civilised achievements of all kinds. But could it not also be read as a failure of optimism?

It’s a thought that lands like a ton of bricks in the middle of any temptation I might feel to wag a moralising finger at someone just starting out now on adult life. Maybe each of these tattooed, unmarried, commitment-shy young people is less a weak-chinned scion of all that is good, pissing his or her cultural inheritance up the wall on frivolities, than a despairing soul fallen out the other end of of a cultural moment and stuck in their own personal Weimar Republic with no meaningful event horizon and no desire to do anything but dance, drink, fuck and draw on themselves with Biro. If this is the case, then older generations truly have a duty to try and help in some way. What ‘help’ looks like in that context I am less sure, but it is surely on anyone over 35 or so to consider where hope resides, and what duty we have to ensure it is not, like home ownership or a stable job, simply something that people used to have before we all gave up and danced ourselves to a childless, tattooed death.

The Guardian reports on the first advertisements to fall foul of June’s Advertising Standards Authority rule change on ‘sexist stereotypes’ in advertising. One ad was banned because it depicted a woman sitting on a bench next to a pram. The advertiser claimed that the ad was about ‘adaptation’, and that adjusting to the arrival of a newborn baby is a situation where people must adjust. It was no use. The ASA “concluded that the ad presented gender stereotypes in a way that was likely to cause harm”.

Depictions of motherhood, then, are harmful to women, because they are sexist. Really? Hold on a minute. It is also polite received opinion, among the same class of our Progressive Betters who spend their time complaining about sexism in advertising, that mothers should be encouraged to breastfeed. And in this, our Progressive Betters are not thinking their position through. Because unless a mother is willing to spend hours a day hooked up to a milking machine, breastfeeding obliges her to be near her baby. How else are we to be present, boob at the ready, when our infant is hungry?

How are we to make sense of this muddled message? The only reasonable interpretation is that, in truth, our Progressive Betters do want mothers to breastfeed, to be available to our babies. But they want us to do it brim-full of miserable ambivalence. We are to breastfeed while editing science journals, answering emails from the CEO, or possibly skydiving or in space. We are to keep no more than one foot in motherhood at any time, and feed our babies knowing that this can never be a source of pride. Because to commit fully to motherhood as an occupation (even for a few short years) is to show – at best – a lack of imagination and ambition, if not a fully-fledged identification with patriarchal oppression and concomitant hatred of the rest of our sex.

The notion that depictions of motherhood are ‘harmful stereotypes’ is a rejection of the reality that a majority of mothers want to care for their children, generally a great deal more than they want to spend all day staring at spreadsheets, trading stocks or cleaning offices. But it is worse than that: by depicting motherhood as a ‘harmful’ stereotype, this value system encodes in the public sphere the notion that motherhood is a kind of failure.

In these rulings, in the name of social progress, the ASA has institutionalised contempt for traditionally feminine values. Women, it is implied, only throw off our oppression to the extent that we succeed in dissociating ourselves from any of the qualities traditionally (that is to say stereotypically) associated with motherhood. Values such as kindness, patience, empathy, self-sacrifice, placing others’ interests before our own. These values are ‘harmful’ and could (in the words of the ASA) result in women ‘limiting how [they] see themselves and how others see them and the life decisions they take’.

Instead, we should embrace stereotypically masculine virtues: courage, activity, adventurousness, leadership. Never mind that most women want to play the lead role in caring for their children, and that kindness, patience and a willingness to put others first are considerably more useful when dealing with a howling preschooler than two doctorates or experience leading a blue-chip corporation. Or is that just my identification with my own oppression?

Most women do a solid job of combining work interests and caring for children. More power to every single one of us, however we make it work. But it really does not help to be told that half of our useful skill set – which we know perfectly well is useful – is in fact ‘harmful’ and encouraging us to limit ourselves. Has the ASA and the rest of our Progressive Betters considered that those of us who are mothers, and who do not prioritise work above all else, just have a different idea of what constitutes ‘limitation’, and what constitutes success?

Perhaps our Progressive Betters should step back from their attempts at social engineering and think about the message they are actually conveying. Perhaps they might consider that using institutional power to enforce public valorisation only of women performing stereotypically ‘masculine’ activities, and censoring any association of women with stereotypically ‘feminine’ ones, in truth does real women with real children no favours. That they are in fact liberating women from nothing but our confidence that the skills we use in caring for our children are valuable, and that caring is itself valuable. Perhaps then they might see that their efforts to censor any public representation of motherhood, or valorisation of the traits that help mothers succeed, represents not feminist progress but a profound hatred of motherhood: the deepest and most vindictive misogyny of the lot.

When I was younger and more idealistic, I started a business with friends. Being (as most twentysomethings are) well-meaning lefties, we thought hierarchy was A Bad Thing. We were determined to do things differently, with a flat structure and no one of us in authority over the others. We believed that among the group we would self-organise to ensure all tasks were completed in a timely way.

It didn’t work. Things fell through the cracks, resentments built up. And without clear lines of accountability power games began to emerge within the group as hierarchy fought to re-establish itself. Those games culminated in such hostility that it became impossible to work together. The business failed, and in that experiment with egalitarianism I lost more than the venture I’d put heart and soul into: the friendships that had inspired us to start the business never recovered. I came away with little except a hard lesson in the value of hierarchy. Egalitarianism sounds lovely on paper, but to organise a system of any complexity there needs to be someone with an overview and decision-making authority.

This insight is not controversial in the world of business. So why, when it comes to the domestic setting, is egalitarianism still flavour of the month?

In popular feminism, we hear repeatedly that management, monitoring and coordination of domestic matters should be evenly distributed between adults in a relationship. Countless articles rehash the idea; this one is typical. The burden of remembering to buy loo roll, putting things away, packing school bags, knowing when the windows were last cleaned and so on is called ‘the mental load’. This ‘mental load’, we are told, is unthinkingly handed to women by men who simply take the smooth running of domestic matters for granted.

I do not doubt that this is often the case. My argument is with those who tell us that the solution is to redistribute this ‘mental load’ evenly. To illustrate why this is a terrible idea, imagine a small business that has two Managing Directors. They have joint responsibility for approving expenses, liaising with suppliers, paying bills, chasing invoices, remembering to get the paperwork into Companies House. How long do you imagine this situation lasts before one of the MDs is seething with resentment, having found themselves in practice being the one who is keeping track of most of these tasks, reminding the other to do things, picking up things the other has forgotten, and fuming inwardly every time their co-MD preens about their progressive company management method? This, or something very like it, happens in households up and down the country where either both parties are trying to be household MD or both are pretending they don’t need one.

The truth is that the ‘mental load’ (which I prefer to think of as executive oversight of the household) cannot be evenly distributed. Someone has to take ownership. That person can delegate parts of the work, or subcontract to paid helpers, but they cannot delegate the overview: cleaners just clean, they don’t put away, or reorganise storage, or declutter, or deep clean – not without someone managing their work – and there you are again, needing someone with executive oversight. Accounts, schedules, storage, organisation, team politics, hygiene, canteen, transport…. like any other moderately complex system, without planning, goals and direction a household rapidly becomes chaotic. There is no point expecting everyone to ‘just muck in’ and make it all work smoothly with no one person in charge. My twentysomething venture was a painful lesson in how that plays out: things don’t get done, people seethe in silence, relationships deteriorate. In short, it doesn’t work.

This matters. What could be more profoundly important to human happiness, whether individual or societal, than harmonious homes where each person knows which jobs are their responsibility and each does their part? And yet our culture treats a household either as something so simple that it should largely run itself, or else as such lowly work that taking responsibility for it is a mark of shame, suggesting as it does a fundamental inferiority to other members of the household.

Worse still, this denigration has been widely presented in popular media as a feminist view. A movement which was supposed to liberate and uplift women has ended up dismissing the complexity and value of the household MD role – a role that had traditionally been women’s field of expertise – so thoroughly that it vanished from the public conversation altogether until re-invented as that most invidious of impositions, the ‘mental load’. And now that being household MD has been thoroughly denigrated as worthwhile in its own right, and in the teeth of best practice from the management of organisations in any other context, we are expected to believe that the solution to this dire situation is to bring in a co-MD. It is a recipe for misery.

Of course there is no obvious reason why the role of household MD should by necessity be taken by women. If a woman feels she is being tacitly handed that role by her male partner and wishes to demur then by all means do things the other way round. But a home cannot get by without someone taking the role, at least not without incurring discord and disarray.

And if no-one wants to do it? What if both partners feel the role of household MD is beneath them? Is that where we are today? If so, it is that lack of respect for what is in truth vital work, not the unequal division of domestic management and labour as such, which should be the issue addressed by those who wish to advocate for the interests of women and families.